Believe it or not, there is a wrong way to make mashed potatoes. It turns out that the starch molecules are fragile and can be physically broken by stirring them too hard, which turns tasty mashed potatoes into something that tastes like and has the texture of wallpaper paste. I don't like those kind of potatoes and rarely screw them up that badly. I avoid the ways this goes wrong by NEVER using an electric mixer to stir up my cooked potatoes. I do it by hand, with a fork. Homestyle means doing this with elbow grease, mashing by hand, and not too quickly. This also leaves them with some texture, though further mashing can remove that, only you risk damaging the starch and ruining the flavor so there's serious diminishing returns involved.
Start with 4-8 red or golden boiling potatoes, not baking (Russet). They don't taste quite right if you use baking potatoes, and they're more work too. You can peel them, if you want, or leave the skin on and mash as is.
Start with a big sauce pan, fill about halfway with water on medium heat.
Wash potatoes, then cut up into 1 inch cubes or slices so they'll cook faster. Cover pot with a lid and set timer for about 20 minutes. If a fork sinks in easily on the top potato, they're done.
Drain the water into the sink, and turn off the stove heat. Residual heat in the potatoes will finish the process.
Using a fork, mash the potato chunks in the pan, smashing each one. Skins, if left on, will tear. That's fine.
Add 1/2 cup milk and 2 T butter to hold them together. I also add sour cream, big dollops. If you have chives available, dice fine and add them. Stir.
Salt the potatoes to your taste.
I find that its fine to prepare them at least half an hour before dinner is served. They hold their heat well in the pot they're made in and its easy to clean them up after serving if you do. Package leftovers in reheatable containers. Mashed makes great leftovers, heats well in the microwave. They go great with meats and veggies and are a comfort food for a reason because they're easy to make, hard to get wrong, and are good leftovers. They go with most kinds of food. Some people like to add garlic to them, but only eat those if you live alone and don't work in sales because it will taint your breath for a couple days. The above recipe works just fine.
Enough politics. The President is blathering on but that doesn't put food on my table. I put food on my table. Thank Me I can cook.
Gravy has many ways it can be done wrong. The reason is the recipes ignore basic chemistry and puts the ingredients together in a self-destructive way. And it's so easy to do it right.
Say you've cooked some delicious meat, a roast for example. You've got those burned on brown bits in the pan under the meat, along with dripped fat, and figure they will taste good so you want to make gravy out of it and put it onto your sliced roast. Good idea.
The way to turn that into gravy is the following:
Melt the brown stuff loose from the pan. This is called deglazing. It requires liquid. Water or milk or wine works great for that. Low heat, lots of stirring and scraping with a spatula till its dissolved.
Set aside. What? Yes, set it aside.
In a CLEAN saucepan or frying pan, throw in a heaping tablespoon of flour and a splash of olive oil. Stir them together into a paste over low heat.
When the paste starts to bubble, which will only take 1-2 minutes so don't walk away, stir vigorously so it doesn't burn.
Add the liquid from the deglaze to your saucepan and stir. The paste will melt into the liquid and the liquid will thicken and expand.
Add a squirt of dijon mustard and stir some more. Glazes are typically salty, but taste just to be sure.
As the gravy cools it will thicken more. If it gets too thick, add beef broth or water or wine and stir.
Because you cooked the flour with oil rather than water, it won't form lumps so you get smooth perfect gravy. This is essentially foolproof provided you don't add water during the initial paste cooking phase and the heat isn't too high. Low works fine.
The traditional method of making gravy is to add flour or a flour and water mix to the deglaze itself. This makes lumps by cooking the outside starch leaving the inside raw. I have a suspicion it is taught this way as a cruel trick on newlyweds, but I can't prove it. Being male, I don't get cooking advice from women, preferring to observe shows and compare recipes then testing claims to verify. For me this is Science, and I work with observations. 37 years of Observations, since I started learning the Art and Science of cooking. Even popular cookbooks contain errors. The Joy of Cooking has many, and leaves out crucial details like the importance of salt when making sweets or icings. Getting gravy making wrong is interesting, particularly since the right way is listed in the Culinary Institute of America's textbook, which I have.
The above Dijon gravy could also be tweaked with other seasonings or cheese. Its good on meats, burgers, steamed veggies (broccoli or green beans), mashed potatoes, and various kinds of fries. As its basically salted flour with a bit of olive oil in suspension its also reasonably healthy. So you can eat this without feeling guilty. And it really does make bland foods taste better. I served the above on meatloaf last evening, with broccoli and mashed potatoes.
The PIMCO Fund Manager Predicts 2013 only 5% growth. And possibly only 4%, with Gold going higher but everything else so low as to match inflation. That's basically Recession. Why does this matter? Jobs. If the economy is crap, there's no jobs. Since we're mere hours away from the Fiscal Cliff and that's going to lead to "The Sequester", there will be across the board spending cuts. I'm seeing many upsides to that. Forcing govt to cut back like the rest of us have been for the last half dozen years? Oh yeah.
I suspect that this was the Democrats plan all along. After all, they get blamed by their constituents if THEY cut programs for the unworthy. But if the Sequester cuts them, its the Republicans fault for refusing the Democrats offer of nothing. So only the poor get hurt by this, and I'm okay with that. So are the Democrats. And the Republicans never get votes from the Poor so they're okay too. The only downside I can see is the end of the Middle Class Tax Cuts, such as they are. I was never a big fan of those, since taxing me to give me the money back? That's not a cut. That's stealing. Give me some credit here.
I have to wonder what the Sequester actually cuts, specifically. I know it cuts military spending. It also cuts everything but Medicare, apparently, but Obama already did that when he put in Obamacare. That took funding from Medicare, yet idiot Democrats still voted for him. Pathetic losers.
PIMCO is a serious mutual fund. Its manager has his office at Newport Beach, a place filled with money and warm weather. I've been there. Nice place, if filled with spoiled new money idiots. Mutual funds are stock funds managed by an expert that sells shares of the fund. Most 401Ks are composed of mutual funds. They tend to rise and fall with the market value so if the market is down, so is the fund. You don't usually lose everything since the risk is spread, but you make less as well. Fairly typical. The most important thing to know about the stock market is "past performance is no guarantee of future performance". Staring at graphs of stock performance is just a history lesson, not a prediction. Fund managers are merely better informed and financially motivated. Not Seers. So their opinions are weightier but not foolproof. They can still get it wrong. The market might go up more than 5%. It might also crash. We won't know until 2014 who was right. Its the time of year for predictions.
One of the big problems of a crap economy is its a knee jerk human response to point fingers at the cause. Everybody does this. Its human nature. The Middle Class are being destroyed since 2006, forced into debt and bankruptcy, many of them with mortgages worth less than the house they own. Personal bankruptcies remain a major problem, and credit card debt is pretty typical. So is student loan debt, which is one of the big reasons to avoid colleges today. That and degrees are pretty worthless. I'm living proof that the ability to learn and experience trump the degree you get from college. And most degrees are going to jobs that pay minimum wage anyway. That's the real future. Minimum Wage. Say it with me: Minimum Wage. We'll all be earning that soon enough. That's the real future with Socialism in charge. A street sweeper will make the same as a customer service person or a skilled specialist knee deep in life risking crap. Why try?
That's the message of the Fiscal Cliff, the Sequester, and the Federal Govt. Why try? That would make a good bumper sticker, actually. Pretty sure its the motto of the Poli Sci major. While I dislike potheads for many reasons, I DO understand why they smoke dope in the first place. There's little point in struggling and sacrificing if you can't get ahead. Why try?
It needs to be said that the Technological Singularity is the latest iteration of Submissive Religion. UFOs, Angels, gods and pantheons. Just give up and they'll take care of everything. Sounds a lot like Parents, when you were a kid. Thing is, if you want that kind of Slavery, North Korea wants YOU.
People get obsessive about Star Trek technology which only works because the writer needed it to for the episode, and much of it is never used again. This is largely because Star Trek writers are hired piecemeal so despite the Roddenberry Bible (the book of rules for the show setting) people often cheated anyway to tell a good story. Or a mediocre story. Star Trek was ruled over by incompetents and genuinely evil people following an apocalypse caused by pro-rights genetic engineering super-humans. They end up becoming genocidal demagogues and there's a nuclear war and a century of Dark Age, this time with guns and mind control drugs. Eventually the Federation evolves and humans take their Submissive pacifism into space where they conveniently fail to do something about terrible tragedy under the auspices of the "Prime Directive" which in modern terms is defined as "convenient plot hole twaddle". Bad writing, in point of fact. But as technology goes, Star Trek is one of the few modern shows that depicts a sort of weakened technological singularity, one not ruled by AI's though it should be, but money is pointless due to free energy and replicators being able to make food and goods on demand for free. Makes having a job rather pointless. They also have free travel by destroying your body and making a new one with your memories. Which is genuinely horrifying.
The Terminator movies (based on books) are about a post singularity AI that decides to kill all humans. Its pretty much the AI from Wargames with robot helpers. This is pretty much what the UN wants to do to the world, only each individual member of the UN thinks they'll kill every nation but themselves. The UN are creepy genocidal maniacs. I don't like them very much. Terminator is probably one of those things they all secretly own the Box Sets to and watch before every session. Creepy. But it IS a post-technological singularity world. Just not one for people.
Star Wars was just Flash Gordon with a better soundtrack, according to its merchandiser creator who just sold the rights to Disney. Fun for kids, inherently flawed. Oh, and all the series apparently revolve around big weapon ships. And George Lucas was anti-war (Vietnam) so the rebels are actually the North Vietnamese and the Empire was USA. Puts a little spin on things, doesn't it? Lucas is not a genius. He repackaged Flash Gordon and gave it a grungy look that people liked. Added some Buddhism and spent a lot of money doping up his artists so they'd create really freaky looking aliens. In the context of bad acid trips and schitzophrenia, the space monsters are suddenly a lot more comprehensible, aren't they? I saw the original Star Wars when I was seven, the perfect age, on opening day with my mom at the Lakeside Cinemas in Santa Rosa, back before THX sound, or even Stereo Sound in theaters. We were a test theater, a couple weeks before the rest of the nation saw it. It was amazing. It was a wonderful childhood memory. Star Wars technology bumped up against mystical Buddhism that worked in the show, but its not real science so its hard to take seriously. The AIs in that series aren't much and the technology seems to be focused on space travel, habitats, and warfare. There's planets of buildings, like Coruscant, where I suppose you could claim singularity happened but it seems to have ignored people largely.
The Matrix is laughable, technologically, and has comic book level incompetence, but its sort of a Technological Singularity, like Terminator, where AIs decided that people were the problem. They don't seem to have their own society, however, just focus on managing ours at a 1996 level which isn't that impressive. The point about doing our thinking for us means it stopped being our society is sort of true. That's about the extent of logic for the series.
People who worship the Singularity love to imagine all sorts of things, like free energy and all engineering being handled by AIs that bootstrap themselves. You could argue that Deep Thought was a Singularity AI, the computer from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. The Apple Computer logo on the screen explains a lot why it failed to get the question, and why the answer was so useless. Berkeley V Unix has many flaws, and the Apple OS is based on that. What they really want is toys to make life easier without actually working for it. And problems they haven't solved themselves to go away. Just let the AIs deal with it.
Since Apple Computer's cult leader is now communing with God DIRECTLY and has not deigned to return to Earth and share the secrets of the universe as predicted by its faithful, I get the idea that Apple's falling stock value will continue until nobody works there and its properties sell off. Apple wants the singularity BAD. In the WORST WAY. Because their entire business plan is based on exploiting their workforce until their coding projects sell, then those coders get a percentage. Not wages while they work. Its all, apparently, on spec(ulation). However, Apple also sells "upgrades" that only partially work. Most of the time, new Features suck, according to Apple users and more reviews than I can count. You have to pay AGAIN to get the feature you already paid for to work. Great business plan, as long as your customers are morons. So far, that's been true. Which is why I refer to Apple customers as Cultists. They're unable to parse basic success or failure, instead pretending all is well. I wonder how much longer that computer company will exist?
A singularity AI could fix Apple computer's code, enabling it to work the first time. And do it cheap enough Apple might be able to afford to do what Microsoft does, which is free patches to fix what's broken rather than making you pay again and again. This is one of the reasons I don't mock Microsoft. They're more honest and don't double and triple charge you. They also support all hardware. Apple doesn't. Neither does Linux. If you want a computer you can buy semi random components for, and various USB toys, Microsoft is what you want. With Apple? So sorry! Not approved! This is the Totalitarian world model they accidentally created, self mockery of the worst and most hypocritical kind. LOL.
The biggest problem with the Singularity is it presupposes that just because you have AIs that are smarter than we are, they can solve our energy crisis... which is not terribly logical. Wishful thinking, really. Just because you have AI's doesn't mean you have robots to do anything with them. And just because you can build robots to build things for the AI's running them, it doesn't make them mobile, or solve the power density problem either. Robots aren't magic. They need power to run or they can't move or think. This is a big part of why they're mostly stationary.
Google Cars are supposed to be an autonomous driving car with radar to emergency stop if a kid runs into the road ahead of the thing. Or at least I hope its got that. They're testing them in Reno, if you can believe it. That makes me nervous. Better than a cab driver or drunk driving fine, I suppose, but seriously? Give up that much control? Not anytime soon. Not with the quality of computing being where it is now. I'll pass. When I finally get my Motorcycle license and get a scooter to ride around town, and hopefully to work when its warm and dry enough, I'm going to laugh constantly. I might even put it on the loop in MP3 and play it as I drive through town on a small stereo. Just loud enough to barely hear, rather than annoy the world.
I can't see the singularity doing many positive things in the real world of energy scarcity. If the AIs don't figure out solutions to electric batteries and enforce cheap solar and build up the necessary infrastructure to bring water to the deserts, what good are they? These are the major human problems. People kill over living space because we don't have food and water where we need it. These can be solved with cheap energy but we don't have cheap energy anymore. We have expensive and dirty energy and its not going to get better anytime soon, if ever. And that sucks. But that's how the real world works. The above stories of Technological Singularity are scifi fantasies, after all. They won't work in the real world. And that's just how it is.
The last election proved that America (the USA) is divided. The Socialists want the working class (me) to pay for their permanent vacation and buffet lifestyle of bling and hookers. I have to say: "No.". We work too hard for too little, competing with actual enemies (India, China) who are undercutting us in the name of stock prices on Wall Street. To hell with them all. The working class are selling off their stocks and bailing out of their 401Ks. Why bother? Its worthless anyway. We've lost everything. At some point, breaking up the USA is going to make a hell of a lot of sense. And that's what I want to talk about.
I want you to picture America after another four years of failure from the Top. The current president got re-elected by bribing enough voters with stash to win again. The other guy wasn't great either, I admit, but at least he was different. Neither guy gave a damn about me. The old guy failed for four years to keep any promises and the economy got WORSE, consistently. I expect that trend to continue. After all, doing NOTHING seems to be enough for his re-election, and his evident contempt for us was plain in every debate, in every speech. He was on his way to another fund raising party, hosted by Wall Street and the Fascist corporations looking for better stock value. We don't even get consideration. In four more years, the currency will be pretty well tanked. The EU should be broken up, or so insolvent that the Euro is worthless. Italy, Greece and Spain are bankrupt by then, with overall unemployment, daily riots, and food lines if not outright starvation. Most of the able population has fled into the small towns raising vegetables for the table, rather than for sale, and nobody is paying taxes because the general population just kills the collectors in riots. Its like Palestine, rocks and molotov cocktails thrown at APCs and riot police, throwing the canisters of tear gas right back at the cops. That's Southern Europe.
America isn't much better. The PNW (Pacific Northwest) has pretty well split off the USA. The Midwest is operating out of Denver as a capitol, with Chicago acting as a trade center. Louisiana has become the poster child for Federal Incompetence, with Detroit its red headed sibling. Both are abandoned and falling apart, with New Orleans and Detroit ending up as movie sets for post-apocalyptic flicks and TV shows, while dodging wild dogs and actual gangs of drug smugglers. At bit too Mad Max for comfort. The Northeast remains pretty well demolished from Hurricane Sandy and subsequent hits go unrepaired, as its an easy form of urban renewal to let black neighborhoods on the Atlantic Coast get flooded and white neighborhoods get rebuilt. Of course, its perfectly legal, thanks to insurance coverage and building standards being enforced that drive the poor out of their homes. They can't afford the new rents or the repair costs or the new homeowners insurance rates associated with the hurricanes. No free lunch. Sorry. With Federal Dollars being worth only 20% what they were in 2006, funds don't go far in repair. Loss of revenue from the Midwests and PNW means the Federal Govt in Washington DC has less to call upon and demanding higher taxes from the very states most damaged by the hurricanes doesn't go over well. Especially for already Socialist countries like Massachussetts, a place so warped by entitlement it's treated as a foreign nation by distant countries like California or Mexico.
California's tax problems do not cease either. Even without annual wildfires and the costs of ineffective and burdensome high speed rail projects that go from nowhere to nowhere, collapsing road infrastructure and ever-higher fuel prices mean commuters are forced to live closer to their jobs, even if those jobs are less satisfying and pay less. The result is a sharp increase in both spree killings and serial slayings in all communities. Even wealthy ones are suffering from general and specific unhappiness as the car culture dies. With the end of commuting, traffic woes are related more to deteriorating roads dropping speeds and higher and higher gasoline taxes and car registration fees, increasing the burden on persons still working and businesses that rely on shipment of physical goods.
Wall Street remains happy thanks to refusal by the Federal Government to institute trade tariffs or resolve trade imbalance in any way. Most agricultural communities have their prices dictated to them by foreign powers buying wheat, soy, corn, and rice, all as they improve their own economies. After all, Americans deserve to suffer. They had it good for decades. They were big meanies. They were spoiled. Now that the Baby Boomers have gotten their retirements, their children can pay the price. And pay. And pay.
Birth rates drop, the only population growth is by illegal aliens. And still the nation collapses further. After all, you don't need to be legal to get free food and medical care and use of all USA's resources, including schools. No green card required. Because that would be fair, and we don't do that in America.
Ya know, I really understand how the Native Americans felt. I wonder if I'm living in a future "reservation"? Is this how America divides? Kill the settled ones off? New surge of immigrants takes over till they run out of enthusiasm for being conned, repeat with new immigrants? I can sort of seeing that be the ultimate outcome of the Bubble Economy. A sort of sustainable wave of bubbles, exploited by the same sort of politicians and fascists based on the Robber Barons of the Gold Rush. It sort of makes sense in an Evil and Twisted way.
In the wake of the insane kid who shot up a Kindergarten and murdered his own mother with her own gun, which he stole, blame is pointed at the gun rather than the fact the guy in question was insane. Why? I don't understand that at all. What I do understand is that its now politically popular to blame firearms for deaths.
What they aren't saying is that cars are next. Firearms kill around 1400 per year in the USA, including police shootings, accidents, and murders. The problem is that 1400 a year isn't really that many, not compared to those people killed by cars. Cars kill 32,000 in the USA alone, every year. Some years its MORE. We've had 57,000 dead from car crashes a few years ago. And since we've already set precedent that the Tool IS the Weapon, then Cars are Murder-machines, same as Guns, only WORSE. That means that anything car related should expect to be treated just as viciously as things gun related are. It is coming.
"Nobody NEEDS a high capacity murder machine." Just because you've got a lot of kids doesn't mean you deserve to own a weapon that's killed 32,000 people last year. Owning one is the same thing as killing all those people yourself. That's the sort of predjudice being applied to gun owners since the Connecticut nutjob killed those children. The media doesn't seem to want todiscuss how crazy he was, only that the GUN was guilty.
Apply that same logic to cars. There will be limits set on the number and diameter of wheels. Special licensing of horsepower above a certain amount per pound of vehicle weight. Legal restriction on seating arrangements, air bags, belt types, and locks that prevent a vehicle from operating if a passenger is unbelted while the vehicle is in motion, perhaps with fines and points against the drivers license. Eventually, manual driving will be banned because only specialized experts with very expensive training deserve to operate motor vehicles manually. Just like guns have limits placed on them now. Eventually we'll be looking at special permits to operate a car without an Autodrive robot to control it for you. Google Cars is just the beginning of the Autodrive. BMW and Mercedes are working on those too. In the end, it's going to mean banning cars from popular use, and the freeways will empty of all but the limousines and the few trucks carrying emergency supplies while the masses sit at home, helpless, or walk around, unable to get further than their own two feet can carry them. Perhaps by 2018 it will be illegal to drive, and by 2025 too expensive to do so. I really hope you like walking.
Government may do this directly, under popular outrage because cars killed 32,000 people in 2011, and probably an equal number in 2012. We raise a stink over gun deaths, but its 20 times more deaths caused by automobiles. When does the slaughter stop? Why can't we ban cars? After all, once the guns are gone, nobody can stop the tow trucks taking them away to be "recycled" for the important and deserving politicians doing "good works", handing over your tax dollars to the undeserving. That's how it works, right?
Only murderers NEED cars. I don't care how many kids you have to take to school. Bicycle or walk. Or have the common decency to move into town, you heathen murdering bastard! Having a drivers license is just a murder license. You're a terrorist, a killer on the loose. You're waiting for your chance to gun run down school children (in the crosswalk). That's how the news media will portray you in a few short years.
I wonder how long before they ban cellphones? Texting while driving is dangerous. Take away the cars but texting while walking is dangerous too. Will they ban texting while walking near a street, because you MIGHT step in front of a Google autodrive car which might not have sufficient time to brake and may kill your stupid texting ass? Will there be cops and cameras to text you a fine using your phone and facial recognition software when it spots you walking with a phone in your hand, head down to read it? I'm sure Britain would do it first, but California would follow. After all, the software already exists. Britain is perfecting it as we speak. Will California start fining based on anything the computer witnesses you do while near one of those recognition cameras? Will you have to get rid of the cellphone just to jaywalk? After all, the phone can prove you were there because its got a signal and fake!GPS is running all the time to nail your position plus or minus 3 feet. That's enough to catch you in the street and prove it for a judge. How would you feel about being texted a fine right as you reach the middle of the street? How many unpaid fines before the police pick you up for behaving unlawfully? This IS the direction our nation is going with the guns and cars and food and phone laws. Is that the kind of America you want to live in?
I wonder how long before they ban fatty foods? "Do you have a license for that French Fry, Madam? Oho! Felony possession! You are under arrest for violation of the Transfat Ordinance of 2015." You'll be arrested, booked, and forced into re-education camps to overcome your filthy perverted eating habits, as you deserve. Fatty. Pervert! You'll have to register with the sex crimes division for eating transfats. Just as bad as a gun owner. Or a licensed car driver.
Yeah, its all fun and games till they take something YOU care about. How long before your Facebook posts get you fired? How long before refusing a call from a spouse is legal grounds for a divorce? I think we're becoming a Fascist nation, all thanks to the Nerfherders(tm) who want the world to be Safe so they can stop paying attention or being responsible for their own actions. Pathetic.
The biggest irony? Even if they don't have a "ban" on cars, they can still make licensing them really expensive. Throw in $15/gal gasoline (which is coming), self-driving cars, electric cars (which costs $60K), and eventually they'll be too expensive to operate unless you're actually Rich. At which point, it becomes unsafe to drive due to car jacking and violence, of the Palestinian Rock Throwing kind or the more serious IED kind. Hey, driving around with $7-20K in batteries in your car is a great motive for car jacking or kidnapping. We may end up with a world where cars are too unsafe to drive for security reasons.
The rest of us seem to be too obnoxiously proud to take scooters or bicycles seriously as commuter vehicles outside of goofy places like Davis or weird ones like San Francisco. As soon as you get into hills, bicycles become as much work as walking and once you're geared down to walking speed you may as well hop off and push it. I remain deeply annoyed at the legal refusal to enable scooters in California. They have to be cheaper than the gasoline they're replacing or it doesn't work. I just spent some time in Palo Alto and I have to say that's a great place for scooters... but I saw none on the road. Some bicycles, including after dark with no reflectors. Those are suicidal people hoping to die so they can stop suffering life any longer. Not a serious commuter vehicle. Real commuters need reflectors, blinking lights, bright clothing, the whole she-bang. A scooter would give them that, and at no real weight penalty since it's a powered vehicle, but they just weren't around. I saw sports motorcycles on El Camino Real (The Kings Road) but no scooters. I dealt with sports cars, passenger cars, vans, and trucks of many sizes, but no scooters. I really think this is one thing Vietnam is already doing better than we are. And how sad is that?
One of the many lessons I've learned from experience is the value of seasoning food. With incredibly perfect ingredients you don't need much at all. I can't afford those much of the time. Instead I buy ingredients I can afford and season them to make them tastier. Restaurants know this too, so to increase profits they add lots of salt to things. The salt perks up your tastebuds so you notice the flavor more. Chinese restaurants and pre-prepared foods use MSG (Mono-Sodium Glutamate) which is another appetite enhancer. Most "Asian" sauces contain this too.
My best surprises in seasoning were the following:
Cumin is good with potatoes. I learned this before eating Indian food, which pairs them all the time, but its fantastic on hash browns and oven baked fries.
Allspice can be bought in packets for $1/oz (this is cheap) and used in baked goods like muffins is an appetite enhancer. Great in cookies too.
Eggs with a dash of soy sauce are great scrambled. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese when you're done and they're even better.
Reducing sugar in pumpkin pie and other baked goods often makes them taste much better because you can taste the ingredients and seasonings that the sugar was covering up. This is true with apple and cherry pie too.
If you add semi sweet chocolate chips to dry roasted salted nuts, both taste better. The salt makes the chocolate taste better, and the chocolate works with the nuts nicely. It's a good combo for snacking AND dark or semi-sweet chocolate is good for male fertility, mainly due to the theobromine and thiamine in the chocolate. The omega-3 fatty acids in the nuts may or may not be good for you, but they aren't bad. Same as in Salmon
Salt your meat AFTER you cook it. Otherwise the salt dries it out. Unless that was the plan all along. This is key with Steak. Bring solutions are great with smoking or slow roasting meats, such as proper BBQ. Otherwise cook with the other seasonings, let rest, then salt right before serving.
Meatloaf made with shredded carrot, fine diced onion, and celery with an egg and a dollop of either soy sauce or BBQ sauce is fantastically delicious, mainly because the french trinity seasons meat well. It is also healthy.
Vanilla yoghurt goes with pretty much every kind of fruit, even canned. If you're trying to lose weight or eat healthier, this is an option.
The best way to figure out how to season something is to open various spices in your collection and smell them while thinking of the food you're about to cook. Your brain will tell you if that season has been used before and if it was tasty or not. Turns out that smells are strong memory triggers and shortcut around other parts of the brain so this is a very efficient way to do it.
Hope some of these tips are new to you. I find they're very helpful when living on a small food budget. It will likely save you years in experimentation.
When I watch anime I've reached a point where I admire the cooks and
healers most. The conflicts that are enhanced (not resolved, made worse)
by violence are often either asinine or pure evil, often by both sides.
The healers pick up the mess, heal the bystanders and combatants and
they'll do it all again, killing more helpless people. If you heal a
violent person who kills people, doesn't that do harm? Anime never asks
those hard questions. They really ought to. One of the cuter anime I've
seen that made me feel better about them is Kamichuu! which is subtitled
"The Goddess is a Middle School Girl" and its very cute.
There
is good anime to watch which doesn't leave you feeling angry with the
Japanese. Sure, most anime is aimed at teenage boys who desperately want
to commit the Rape of Nanking over and over again, but they mostly grow
out of it. We're busy punishing their great grandchildren for the war
crimes of WW2. At some point we're going to have to relent.They've only got two formula one race car drivers, and one of them is a rich poseur who's reasonably good in the wet but otherwise non-competitive. How sad is that? Too many Divine Wind attacks meant these guys left behind no kids. The best of Japanese men died in WW2 in suicide attacks. Only the cowards and the wounded or those much too young to fly even survived the war. After the surrender, Japan was more than ungrateful. Hateful would be a better description. We built their schools and power grid, which is why it looks the same as here, and bootstrapped them to the point that they could destroy our car industry and Sony gave us CD music players that made vinyl a sad commentary on analog technology. Things moved forward. Japanese cellphones are still on a better network than ours. 12 years advanced over our legacy crappage.
For a pure newby interested in anime that doesn't make you want to bomb Tokyo, I'd recommend a classic like Tenchi Muyo, which is on Hulu. Please note, this is Tenchi Muyo, NOT Tenchi Universe or Tenchi in Tokyo. Those are different and not nearly as good. This show is characterized as a story of good hospitality with a side of comedy and space opera in a fairly short format. The characters are memorable and the show is a classic of anime for good reason.
Another classic is Love Hina, which is slapstick based on a Japanese version of French comedy from the Dark Ages. Punch and Judy, specifically. The main character is a bit of a loser who happens to be largely indestructible but also somewhat stupid. He's been conned by his grandmother to manage a girls dormitory in hopes that he'll marry one of them. So its a romantic slapstick comedy about college and living with the opposite sex. The characters are memorable and the hijinks are exactly the sort you'd get from La Cage Aux Foles (more modern version is "Threes Company") which again, is French slapstick.
Naru, the brunette with the antenna hair in the towel, is what's called a "tsundere" girl, which could be translated to thunder if you want to be dramatic but is more accurately described with "methinks the lady doth protest TOO much". She's a popular type of trope girl, but since the girls of Love Hina are actually such archetypes as to be models of modern Japanese Feminism, there's entire Tropes pages dedicated to it. Again, Love Hina is another classic, about 15 years old.
While there's tons of Japanese Anime dedicated to giant robot combat, like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam (so many series!) they aren't all serious.
There are some great ones that actually parody the serious shows, like Martian Successor Nadesico which has so many in jokes and references that you need to watch at least one season of Gundam to get the joke. Evangelion is so depressing people have committed suicide after watching it. A couple of its creators did, during production. When they finally got around to finishing the series a few years later, the creator opted to kill off the popular Tsundere in a really horrible way that traumatized fans. He got death threats for that. Evangelion is noteworthy as a classic anime for a specific reason: it applied full cinematographic techniques to ANIME, making it like a movie rather than a kids cartoon. This proved that anime could be QUALITY filmmaking beyond Studio Gibli and raised standards. So its worth watching, just understand you might want to cry afterwards. Compare this to Nadesico, which romps all over the typical tropes abused by Gundam and Space Battleship Yamato, which is so bad that its basically a denial that Japan lost WW2. The star of the show is the Battleship Yamato, which we blew to hell using a couple planes and bombs dropped from the air. Battleships can't defend against a couple hundred pound bombs with that kind of energy. The physics says "up yours!" to deck plating armor. We proved that point in WW1. Japan was asinine over that decision.
Btw, in Yamato, Americans are the thinly veiled "alien invaders", since it was made when we were rebuilding their schools and hospitals after the war. Ungrateful pricks. Any time you see a character with 1950's style hair? That's supposed to be the bastard child of an American serviceman, and the Japanese think they're subhuman rapist brutes who bully the good and decent Japanese, the same Japanese who were busy beheading Chinese and Korean civilians during the war just for kicks. Yeah. No honor there.
One of the better points for Nadesico is that it uses the same voice actor from Evangelion, mocking HIMSELF in every possible way. Nadesico just makes you laugh and laugh, most of the time. It has some dark points, but mostly its parody. Also, the hero is a cook. He doesn't actually LIKE giant robot combat. He just wants to make good tasting food. "I'm a cook!" is his literal battle cry, more than once. You have to like that.
In more recent times, I have to recommend Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu aka The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Haruhi is a Genki Girl. Genki is cheerful and enthusiastic. She kind of bipolar. The problem is, when she gets frustrated or depressed she destroys the world. She's literally God. With the capital G. She's surrounded by some amusing trope characters and is counterbalanced by a fairly normal boring guy who is forced into adventures without telling Haruhi what's going on because if she knew she was God (capital G again) she might destroy the universe even worse than the last couple times. She rebuilds it again, mind you, based on how she wants things to be, but the super-aliens and time travellers get a little upset about it. So they've got spies minding her. Haruhi is a wonderful girl, very bright, very enthusiastic, sometimes too much so, but still filled with energy. The very definition of Genki. And the show is pretty amusing since the hero mumbles to himself with complaints which he thinks are his monologue but most people actually hear because he doesn't realize he's saying them out loud. How can you not like a character so goofy?
Another quirk of Haruhi is she's actually quite brilliant. She thinks she's smart so she is, and doesn't realize that her ability to do anything she sets her mind to is unusual. Even learns to sing and play guitar in one of her better moments.
I think Haruhi is meant to represent the frustrations of women having no future in Japan, and why so many flee for California. I ran into dozens of Japanese women, most with education greencards, going to Foothill College for medical degrees so they could stay here instead of deal with greedy rapist males back in Japan. Did you know that in Japan, the worst punishment you can face for rape is 2 years in jail and $2500 fine. That's it. And most of the time there's no jail because "she was asking for it and I'm Pure Japanese". And that's good enough for their justice system. Small wonder women move here. Segregated railcars because of train perverts groping female passengers being COMMON?? That would NEVER happen here. So wtf Japan? WTF?
One of the better anime about modern Japanese poverty is done with aliens acting as a metaphor. Its called Niea_7. The _ is read as "Under". Niea is a freeloading alien living in the closet of a girl trying to get into college, attending cram school and working 3 jobs while living in the bathouse, itself a sign of poverty, that used to belong to her family but was sold because they lost their shirts in the economic collapse. In this world, the aliens are just as incompetent and impoverished as everyone else, and the girl in question barely has enough to eat. A boy she knew as a kid brings her bags of rice to LITERALLY KEEP HER ALIVE in hopes of winning her heart and marrying her. She doesn't really want to, since that means giving up on college and her dreams of business success, but the economy is terrible (just like real life).
Its kinda disappeared so likely has to be rented or purchased unless you can track it down. This is one I own.
For purely absurd parody of giant robot mecha anime in a modern setting, I have to recommend Full Metal Panic, the first arc, followed by Fumoffu. Its got Punch and Judy style slapstick with the typical "His Power Level is over 9000! That's impossible!" jokes.
This is all you really need to know about THAT show. Full Metal Panic is hilarious. A child soldier mercenary who pilots mecha gets assigned as a bodyguard to a high school girl in Japan. Hijinks ensue. She's a tsundere bluenette who happens to have a head crammed full of secrets. He's scarred identically to Ruroni Kenshin.
Another classic, but one I don't care for so didn't watch. Sousuke Sagara is rather broken, seeing as he's a child soldier so doesn't know how to talk to normal people or be a teenager without seeing everything as a combat operation. The majority of the humor in the show is this distinction. I was married to a female soldier and she sometimes acted that way herself. Falling back on training can lead to hilarity.
See? Comedy gold. Particularly when Japan is one of the strictest anti-gun nations on earth. Small wonder they also have the highest rate for Rape on earth too. Sousuke would never stand for that, but he's heavily armed and utterly ruthless. A good part of the humor is the women around him spend their time holding him back from his usual level of destructiveness. This one is on Hulu. Worth watching if you want to laugh. The animation quality is good, too.
Ouran High School Host Club is a comedy about rich people being weird. I like that one. Watched it many times. Cheaper animation doesn't detract from the dry humor of the cross-dressing heroine (girl dressing as a boy because she just doesn't care). Haruhi, not Suzumiya, is a good comedy character with a male harem (aka Reverse Harem) of rich boys who kind of dote on her in their way. She's part of a club that for pricey donations pretends to woo rich girls while serving them tea and cakes at a fancy private school. Host Clubs actually exist in Japan, btw. A hot woman will drink with you, and encourages you to buy you both drinks. She drinks colored water while you get drunk, paying for the actual drink and she splits the cost with the bar owner while giving you company so you aren't drinking alone. No sex, she's not a prostitute. She's a hostess. There's a reverse version for women, too. Either tea or proper drinks for salarywomen. And there's a cross-dressing version too, for gay people, who are more accepted in Japan than here, apparently. Cultural acceptance is different there.
There are anime that should be avoided. Bleach is awful. Naruto is awful. One Piece is basically a comedy retelling of the Asian classic "Journey To The West". Its not very good, though. So is Saiyuki. There are a bunch of these, actually. Hellsing has its moments but its largely not very good and the remake is actually worse. Pretty much any anime that's made entirely for boys should be avoided.
The "slice of life" anime tend to be funnier and sweeter, with cute girls doing cute things. I can't complain about those, so long as they're properly dressed. Lucky Star is hilarious. So is Moyashimon, Yuru Yuri, Pet Girl of Sakurasou, Wagnaria (aka Working!), and Sket Dance. These are light comedy which makes you feel more cheerful. Stuff worth seeing instead of being stressed out or depressed. These are shows Japan has every right to be proud of, and go some distance to improving their own image internationally. They're on Crunchyroll.com btw. The best thing about anime? They don't suck hard like American TV shows. They're interesting. That's a great reason to watch them.
On Christmas, which I'm culturally required to participate in despite being a Hardcore Atheist since the Holiday, as celebrated, comes directly from the Gaelic peoples I'm descended from. Traditionally you either cook a goose or a ham on xmas. We bought a Turkey a month ago and its been sitting frozen in the bottom shelf of our freezer, waiting for sufficient health of my mother to actually eat it. Both my folks are elderly, in their 70's, and were too tired and overwhelmned by recent events so I handled the whole thing while they rested. Roasting a turkey is not hard. First, get a turkey. Then defrost it. They're always a bit frozen unless you've killed it yourself. Pull out the neck and giblets, put them in a saucepan with water and slowly simmer them over very low heat. You'll want that broth later, you see.
Wash the turkey inside and out to get off any unwelcome nastiness from the processing plant. Now oil the skin. Some people use soybean oil because it doesn't burn. Some people use safflower oil because it's healthier. Some use melted butter because it tastes better. I used olive oil because it tastes good and its very healthy. Season with poultry seasoning, sage, tarragon, and anything else which smells good that your brain associates with turkey or chicken. Rub it into the skin. Cover the breast with a big piece of aluminum foil. This cuts down on the evaporation from the white meat and keeps it MOIST. MOIST is good.
Yeah, like that.
Stuffing is best when its made with diced onion and celery rather than just Stovetop brand on its own. Prepared with a sauteed onion, better yet SWEAT the onion and celery and sliced mushroom, seasoned with what's on the skin, then add the croutons and stuff in the bird. Cover the opening with more foil so it doesn't dry out. This will absorb the steam and juices in the bird's "cavity" and make it extra tasty.
Put the bird in the oven at 325'F in a sufficiently large pan, possibly with a rack if you have one, and roast for around 4 hours. Its done when the meat hits 160'F in the thickest part of the breast. Use a meat thermometer. If you want to make good roasts, you need one of these. Go low-tech. Its easier and there's less to fail.
Now, go do something else for the next 3 hours. I played video games. Btw, this technique works on chickens too, just shorten the roasting time to 90-120 minutes depending on bird size. Or a goose, if you're so inclined. Or a duck. Duck and goose are both really greasy birds. Salting them heavily is often a good idea, and cook them such a way as to let the grease run out. I haven't had great experiences with either of those birds. Still, I'm sure I could figure out a way if its what I had to eat.
Generally speaking you want to serve pumpkin pie for dessert with this, which means you have to bake the pies FIRST. Remember that. Pie takes around an hour. So do them before you put the turkey in the oven. I realize thats kinda unexpected, but there you go. Cover them with saran wrap so they don't dry out while they cool. Very important. Pumpkin pie tastes bad if it dries out.
Otherwise, side dishes with turkey are the same as Thanksgiving: cranberry sauce, green beans, mashed yam or mashed potatoes. Rolls with butter. The good stuff. A nice white wine or Champagne if you have it. Champagne is cheap enough. Brut is slightly sweet. Dry is not. Expensive champagne has yeast you can taste and must be served ICE COLD. Cheaper champagne doesn't have the yeast so don't bother. Cold enough is fine.
So yeah, that was xmas feast yesterday. Good times. I suspect we'll have soup and sandwiches on New Years Eve, and some champagne. By then my Mom should be feeling much better.
Winter Storm #4 offered snow flurries, which melted, and a little bit of rain. It was gone quickly and we had days of bright sun and below freezing nights which gave us Hoarfrost and black ice. Good times!
After several days of sunny weather, Winter Storm #5 came a couple days ago. It began with snow flurries, then turned to rain. Sometimes brief, sometimes light, sometimes hard. Right now I've got strong winds gusting to 50 mph or so and surges of heavy rain. Allegedly there's snow flurries somewhere but not that I've seen. The wind sometimes gusts to 60 mph and the trees are really bucking around out there, with huge drops of rain coming in at 45 degree angles. I have to say: I'm glad I'm not living in a tent.
Btw, they really don't. Even though Paint Your Wagon is technically set in Nevada City, which is JUST over the hill from me, about 5 miles away. They run the musical every other year at the playhouse on Broad Street.
I think if I was out and about and I got stuck on some back road or my car broke down and I had to walk out I'd want some basic supplies with me. A poncho, waterproofed properly, yellow or bright orange so I'm visible in low light. A fleece pullover, for warmth. A water bottle or two. A knapsack to carry them in. A hand-wound weather radio. I don't have one of those but it's on my list. A couple of energy bars to eat, in case you have to walk. It takes calories to do that. A pocket knife. Those are so useful in the real world beyond the cities. And a cellphone, switched off so it doesn't drain the battery. I often take a camera when I go into the boonies because you sometimes find cool things to take pictures of. And a small first aid kit with tweezers for splinters and some bandaids. Don't overdo it. Just a few things is enough. I've seen people turn their emergency kits into full backpacks, which just adds to the weight they're driving around with and more things to worry about replacing when they expire, which normally gets discovered when you actually need them. Some antibiotic ointments turn into poison past their expiration dates, you know. Others cause allergic reactions for 80% of the population, making them rather useless. I'm one of those 80%, too. The Prepper community tends to obsess about preparing for everything, and I mean everything. Mayan Apocalypse. Asteroid Impact. Supervolcano eruption. Alien invasion. Civil War. Totalitarian govt. Chinese invasion. Mexican invasion (oops!). Superstorm, hurricane, ice storm, flood, fire, landslide, power outage, running out of gas, flat tire, sudden appendicitis. You name it, they've got a prep for it. They often take this too far, mostly out of fear of all the changes we're undergoing as a society, and how people behave compared to how they behaved 20 years ago. All those spoiled children raised more spoiled children and they're surprised the world is a mess? Duh.
So the wind blows and the power is still on and I'm watching episodes of Doc Martin and having a good laugh. That poor poor man. Its like being trapped on Gilligan's Island.
Only it's Cornwall. The coast near where I grew up was like that: cliffs and greenery above a roiling heavy sea. The roads back and forth are narrow and erode in heavy storms so they sometimes close. Highway 1 north of Jenner closed again. Its a steep slide area and the water is deep there, the cliffs high and the road falls away, often. It can't be helped.
North of those cliffs is Fort Ross, the Southernmost Russian fur trading colony. They thought the indians or the Spanish would attack so they had wooden palisades and cannons to protect themselves. Nothing ever happened, but interest in hats made from sea otters waned and the money in the fort dried up. Can you imagine harvesting otters, skinning them, drying their pelts in that wet place, then putting them on a ship headed NORTH to Alaska, then across the Bering Strait, then all the way across Siberia BACK to Moscow, then carried up to St. Petersburg or down to the Black Sea, then off to Paris so it could be turned into a hat and sold to a gentleman? Ridiculous. That's rough terrain around 3/4ths of the world. Of course it didn't last. Neither side knew about the Gold, which was discovered later. Both are kicking themselves over that one. I just laugh.
Everybody I know seems to be blogging about the silly Mayan Apocalypse coming to nothing. Dunno why anyone would think something would happen. Mayans got most everything wrong. Their water supply came from wells. The rains decreased due to El Nino, making the water level fall below the well bottom and suddenly nobody had water. So they all wandered off. They also had no idea about crop rotation so plant pests were a problem too. Their descendents are still down there, the Chiapas Rebels in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. They still speak Mayan. Nothing much going on there other than growing coffee and trying to get people to pay them more for it.
See, when a govt fails to live up to its basic responsibilities, people stop feeling the value in paying taxes. Thanks to the govt failing to protect the borders, keep the floods back (New Orleans) or the lights on (Detroit), people are finding the Federal Government to be a bit disappointing. If there weren't daily broadcast from the elected's office on the news, nobody would give a damn about Washington at all. This is a big part of why I don't watch the news. Besides, I'm a Californian. Seventh or Eighth largest economy in the world. Feeds a billion people with rice. Do we really NEED the Federal government when we get back less than 60 cents of our tax dollars? What do they do for us? Even the hippies running this place are better for California than DC is. And its really easy to ignore DC anyway. Turn off the TV. Bingo, problem solved.
I'm happy that there's heavy rains falling, strong winds, bit of snow. Sometimes it sticks an inch or two, then it melts. That's hardly Mayan Apocalypse, is it? I think I'll spend some time today reading the Motorcycle Safety Manual. Wanna get my license in the next couple months, if I can. I've usually been well in front of the leading edge of tech or fashion or both. Because of this I tend to be pretty jaded about the changes. At present I'm getting jaded about gasoline prices and taxation because I can see both are going to go way up and we're all going broke anyway. Someday you'll be glad to get eggs for protein, and roast beef will be a long ago memory, a food reserved for the politicians and the very rich. Can't be helped. They hate us for being Uppity. That's why they've been methodically ending the Middle Class, turn us all Poor. There's not much we can do about it in a resource scarcity situation like this is. We're going to be Poor. Just accept it and learn how to survive despite this. Silly Apocalypse. We don't need Mayans to see the end of our world.
Persimmon is a fruit that only ripens in below freezing temps, so often its not good until xmas time, after the first frosts. They're a brilliant orange fruit with sharp brown leaves off the stem. They have no seeds. They are excellent in cookies and fruit breads, like a banana bread, only with persimmon instead of banana inside.
Today I made and baked persimmon breads as gifts for our family friends. Mom is home from the hospital after a couple weeks recuperating from surgery so she's not able to cook these things. I, however, am a skilled and arrogant chef, one who has reached The Next Level, even in baking. I have sufficient experience I can make anything I want, even when the factors and chemistry are fudged. It doesn't matter. I'm just that good. But enough about my Ego.
Banana Persimmon Bread Royale (hold the Cheese) Ingredients
5 persimmons, stemmed and washed.
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1 Teaspoon Vanilla
1 cup all purpose flour
1 Tablespoon Baking Powder
1 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon allspice
1/4 Teaspoon cloves
1/4 Teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 Teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup raisins, rehydrated in hot water for 10 minutes
1/2 cup dates, seeded and chopped rough
1/2 cup pecans, chopped
optional:
1/2 cup dried apricot, chopped.
1/4 cup Chocolate chips
1/4 cup dried cranberries
Grind persimmons into mash using cuisinart/food processor using blade attachment. Pour result into mixing bowl. Add sugar, oil, and eggs. Mix thoroughly. Add spices and dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly. Add raisins, dates, and pecans, mix gently. It should be the consistency of lumpy pancake batter.
Oil bread pans and fill 2/3 full with batter. Place bread pans in 360'F oven for 45 minutes, then examine carefully. 360'F is below the burning point of sugar so shouldn't overly brown but still rise properly. If bread appears not fully risen or not showing signs of golden brown, raise temp to 375'F and bake another 15 minutes, then test with a toothpick. If pick comes out clean, its done. If comes out gooey, bake another 10 minutes and retest. It is not unusual for a standard bread pan to take 60 minutes to bake, however sometimes they cook faster, depending on moisture.
I based my above recipe on a perfected version of banana bread I developed 7 years ago, using the above spices. You can use banana for this, or even pumpkin. Ripe mango or apple would work here too. The chemistry is similar to sponge cake or pound cake, which is another very slow cooking sweetened soda bread. It is dense but soft, due to the eggs and oil working with the flour to produce something which keeps well and is very delicious thanks to the spices and sweetness. A small slice is loaded with calories and tastes great with eggnog, coffee, brandy, or dessert wine. Thus the value for gifts or serving at holiday dinner parties. It is not too late to bake presents for your family and friends. Do them the courtesy. Happy Yule and Merry Christmas.
First, get a ham. A big one, 7-15 pounds worth. This time of year they're cheap so it's a good deal.
Put it in a big cast iron pan, then cover it all with foil to keep the steam in.
Bake at 325'F for around 4-5 hours depending on size. Test with a meat thermometer for done, above 160'F is best. Allow it to cool 25 minutes before serving so it stays moist and re-absorbs the water, keeping the meat fibers tender. Slice off pieces with a sharp knife.
Serve with either mashed yams or potatoes for the starch, and its traditional to have either green beans or if you're German, Saurkraut which is actually really good when done right. I'm about a quarter German, but its back around 250 years ago so we long since stopped paying attention to their foods etc. You can also use broccoli or steamed spinach for the vegetable. I also like to have a roll with it. And a salad because this is a bit unhealthy without it.
Cold sliced ham you roasted yourself is the best for sandwiches. I've been eating them daily. Chopped ham is great with eggs, on the same level as bacon but slightly healthier. Once again, the Muslims are missing out on something awesome. Pity them. Meanwhile I'm going to enjoy my ham as I spiral my way around the bone until it's all been eaten up. Yum.
One of my discoveries in cooking is that you can make delicious meatballs using sausage cut into pieces prior to cooking. And that spicy sausage will flavor a soup and retain just a little flavor without overwhelming you. I going to be making a soup today, thanks to the heavy rains coming in.
Yesterday was cold, with faint mist which would certainly have been snow if it was 8 degrees colder outside. Today its warmer still, so we've gotten almost 3 inches of rain overnight and this morning, and its still coming down. I love the sound of rain on the roof, the hard spat of a drop the size of a marble nailing a shingle with the force of a hailstone. The Sierra foothills get a lot of rain each year. I'd hate to have been a prospector, living in a canvas tent with a small wood stove, trying to stay warm enough not to get pneumonia and probably failing because they go in and out of the icy water trying to get enough gold from the gravel to pay for that next pot of coffee and hardtack biscuit. Or laudenum to take away the pain of the pneumonia once you got sick.
I've got a nice roof over my head so I can enjoy the weather out the window while sipping hot coffee and musing over what to cook for lunch today. And today I'll be cooking soup. I'm going to start with the usual French Trinity (onion, carrot, celery), then add mushrooms, potatoes, and chicken stock. Its very healthy. I'll cut up about a pound of mild Italian sausage for the meatballs and primary flavoring. And that will give me a nice simple soup I can eat over the next couple days. Soup and bread will be healthy enough, considering my activity level is low right now. There's not much to do at this point. I'm pretty much waiting or an interview with the County, and I'll try my best to get that job. I think it will be both interesting and good enough pay to live on. I'm keeping my fingers crossed while I wait.
Every year, around 32,000 people are killed in car crashes in the USA. Nobody tries to ban cars, even though someone was driving them when someone died. Cars are dangerous. It is understood that the driver is responsible for the accident.
So why isn't that true for firearms? The firearm, like a car, is a tool. Its like a broom or a shovel. It does a specific job. When a crazy person picks up a kitchen knife in China and stabs a kindergarten classroom, nobody is blaming the knife manufacturer or insisting kitchen knives should be banned. It is understood these are the actions of a crazy person, that the crazy person is responsible. The recent school shooting in Connecticut, and the Mall shooting in Clackamas (Portland), Oregon, and the other holiday insanity murder sprees... these are actions of crazy people. Blaming the gun that made killing all those people easier... If there was no gun, they'd have used knives, and still killed a bunch of children. The cases in China proved that. It was the act of a crazy person. None of these lunatics had the rights to own firearms anyway. They were known crazy. The guns were stolen.
The politicians trying to ban firearms, again, are just trying to hurt their Republican opposition since the NRA is largely a conservative and Republican organization. Its the elitism and citified hatred of Country Folk that the Liberals keep forcing down our throats. And that's more than a little unfair. The NRA has its faults, but its primary purpose is to protect the rights of Americans to keep and bear Arms for both self defense and hunting, which are national rights earned by my ancestors during the Revolutionary War.
It is ridiculous to blame the shovel for the hole, and to blame the gun for the deaths. If you do, you're blaming the car for the crash, and the dress for the rape. Its all about hypocrisy isn't it? Finger pointing. This is "Blame Canada" all over again.
Which was really the point all along. The Liberals see a tragedy of some insane person murdering helpless children and immediately EXPLOIT IT to hurt their opposition, contrary to logic or morality. This is exactly why conservatives HATE liberals right back. This is a huge, unsolvable gulf. I fear that someday, the gulf will turn to open warfare. I really hope it doesn't, but Chile put people in ditches over these sorts of differences. Are we really that much better, morally and ethically, to not take that step ourselves? Perhaps when we're defunding Medicare so the elderly die of pneumonia in chilly rest homes, we won't feel responsible. After all, we won't be shooting them because guns will long since have been banned. Just like cars and shovels and kitchen knives. After all, its the tool's fault that people using them are nuts.
I'm a fan of chimaera splicing, providing it is done in a sane and smart
way so it can't accidentally destroy the world. We have enough problems with
kudzu and rye grass and zebra mussels and all sorts of other imported things
destroying native habitat. Still, nitrogen fixing root nodules from legumes on
all grain crops so they enrich the soil as they grow instead of depleting it?
That would be awesome. Cuts down on the need for nitrogen inputs to crops, which
are often made from natural gas better used for other things, and for the need
to grow soy during crop rotation. That means you could feed the world and
increase the total arable land, provided you have water. This is a good thing.
This one thing could feed a couple or three billion people indefinitely. Ponder
that for a moment. How many wars would that stop cold?
I was recently watching a travel program where a guy running a fair trade
coffee processing plant in Papua New Guinea demonstrated that the fruit of a
coffee bean is actually a type of sweet cherry by eating it. Now, at present
coffee is only grown in tropical and sub-tropical places but it's hugely popular
in cold wet places like the Pacific Northwest. What if coffee was genetically
modified to grow in colder places, and that the cherry was appropriately tart
and sweet for a good pie? I like cherry pie. It needs to sweet enough to go with
coffee and tart enough not to be yucky. Its a tricky mix to pull off. You could
shell the coffee bean, make a pie from the cherry, then roast the bean and make
the coffee to go with it. Wouldn't that be awesome? I think so.
You are probably think I'm being completely silly, but ponder this:
everywhere in the Taiga (the area near the poles where its all pine trees before
it gets too cold and you have Tundra plains) there are needle leaf trees
(pines). The pines are poisonous to wildlife, even bugs due to the sap in them.
They grow there because most deciduous trees can't drop their leaves fast enough
and drain out their sap to avoid being destroyed in snow storms, which can
shatter the limbs if it gets cold fast enough. There are exceptions like birch,
alder, and aspen, but most other trees die in the cold. What if fruit trees like
apples were modified to survive the really harsh cold? Then places like Northern
Canada could have apples growing instead of wasting all the nice summer light
growing marijuana and zucchini. I've been to Alaska in the summertime. It was...
pretty okay. Apply the same modifications to other fruit trees and maybe grape vines.
Imagine if you could grow good grapes in Britain and Norway? That will require modifying the skins so they don't rot quite as quickly when wet. This is why California wines do so well. We don't have summer rains while the grapes ripen. They only get water when we want them to, via irrigation. We get a higher yield of better concentrated grape juice, ideal in sugar content and acid for best possible wine making.
Now take the basic chemistry of desert plants, namely how they thicken their plant fluids using Selenium oxide and selenium sulphate to deny evaporation biochemically. This allows plants to survive extreme drought and not turn into a husk. This is how cactus works. Apply the same trick to fruit trees and vegetable crops, but put in a filter/membrane that keeps the selenium out of the fruit so the fruit is edible instead of poisonous. Pause and consider what that would for Northern Mexico, Peru, and the Sahara. Suddenly you could grow serious crops there with minimal water. All that bare land would become green and feed a billion people or more. The world's deserts would have a massive increase in carrying capacity.
Use coastal vacuum pumps to desalinate sea water, then other pumps to send it inland to the irrigated crops and you've solved world hunger provided the equipment stays maintained.
See, the biggest problems humans face are about food supply, water supply,
and energy supply so they can improve their standards of living and keep their
babies from starving to death. This makes mothers angry and husbands end up
going to war over those resources. Its been like that forever. But it doesn't
have to be. If you expand the resources and reduce the demand for them by making
them more accessible, then you can have a larger population and stabilize
WITHOUT going to war. That's a BIG deal. This is something biotech could do, if
it wasn't so damn greedy and obsessed with catering.
The best solar panel presently available uses Selenium and Arsenic, and
yields 47% efficiency, which is 3 times better than the state of the art panel
in production, and about 8 times the efficiency of the kind most people use on
their house or boat to run electrical backup charging. Georgia Tech came up with
a method to thicken solar panels such that a photon is intercepted and generates
power 4 times each. This layering process makes a single panel around 3 times
more efficient in the same amount of space. Georgia Tech used federal grant
money, and its a public university, but they are pretending to own the patent
despite this. I imagine there will be some Supreme Court action to determine
public funds means public patents, meaning with the needed coolant backing, the
above layered panel using the above SeAs compound means not only can you preheat
your water heater using the waste heat generated on the panel, you can also run
your house and charge a battery for your car so you can commute to work,
assuming we solve the battery problem someday. If hydrogen could be stored
safely, this would work too.
This is what I keep hoping to see science do for the world. Maybe having
enough to eat would allow the more maniacal govts to either calm down or be
deposed by the saner mothers who would very much like a copy of good
housekeeping instead of yet another genocide. Imagining stuff like this is what
scifi writers like me are all about. So its not just for the maniacal laughter,
though that is fun too. It's a proven stress relief.
The Long Way Round is a motorcycle journey that begins in London and ends in New York. The two cyclists are Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, both movie stars though McGregor is best known for Trainspotting and some silly scifi movie series. As novice motorcyclists and campers, they have a crew of people help them cross borders, carry emergency gear, and do most of the filming, though the man behind the camera riding another bike with them is Claudio Von Planta. They travel East across Europe, Russia, Kazakstan, Mongolia, Siberia, then fly from Eastern Siberia to Anchorage, Alaska, then take the Al-Can highway down to the Great Plains and finally cross the USA into New York City. The whole journey takes about 2-3 months. The scenery is fantastic, and the roads vary from normal paved highways to threaded dirt tracks through a muddy wasteland, sometimes disappearing entirely. I happen to think the motorcycles they chose were too heavy, and that they're carrying too much gear, and that they should have waited another month before leaving so water levels would be lower and they'd deal with less mud. That's how other people doing a similar trip do things. You can buy this BBC documentary series on most online retailer sites such as Amazon. Both this and Long Way Down are on Hulu.com in the lifestyle section, of all things. Its legal and commercial so you can watch it for free without risking jail. This is exactly the sort of thing which should be showing on the Travel Channel, as well. My favorite bit of this series begins in Kazakhstan and goes across Mongolia and Siberia on the Road of Bones to Magadan. It's about 3-4 episodes, the meat of the story.
The Long Way Down is a Motorcycle journey, same crew, that begins in the northernmost extent of Britain and goes to the southernmost tip of Africa. They cross the Channel by Chunnel Train, ride across France and down through Italy before taking the ferry to Tunisia. Motorcycling along the Mediterranean Coast and into Libya (Khadafiy's Libya!), they have to abandon some of their crew and meet them on the far side in Egypt. The travels through Africa are surprisingly calm and safe. Every country's border guards express amazement they survived crossing "that other guy's country. That place is lawless". As you'll see, most of the people are nice. And most of them seem glad for the visitors. Once again, their bikes are too heavy, and paranoia about lions provides some unintentional comedy. This is on Hulu.com. Watch it if you have time. It is very interesting. Clearly, Africa is the next Frontier. I hope that Americans will be involved with developing it, not just leaving it to the Chinese who tend to be both ruthless and genocidal based on their ONGOING ACTIONS in very recent history there. My country hasn't treated Africa very well either. One would think that higher standards would apply.
There is a box set available of Long Way Round and Long Way Down which also includes the Race to Dakar, which is interesting for serious race speed offroading and a laundry list of everything that can go wrong. I learned from that one that KTM motorcycles are amazing performers that require immense amounts of replacement parts and that they're not reliable for serious travel so I wouldn't own one. Boorman is the chief racer of this one and seeing him have to man up for the challenges of the Dakar Rally is quite amazing. The huge number of competitors and the behavior of some of the nations they cross eventually resulted in the Dakar Rally moving to South America, so it now crosses Argentina, Chile, and Peru instead of France, Spain, Portugal and Western Africa. It used to be called the Paris-Dakar Rally. The new Dakar rally has many videos on YouTube, samples shot in HD, edited together. It's really fascinating stuff. Our roads are going that direction. I think we'll be going slower, however.
The newer Boorman series of travel videos is called "By Any Means". The first is Ireland to Sydney: By Any Means and is the LWR crew, with fewer men and translators hired on the fly, using any type of typical local transportation, avoiding planes. While sometimes obsessed with timetables it's still very interesting. They take motorcycles to Northern Ireland, a fishing boat to Isle of Mann, a ferry to Liverpool, motorcycles and various other means across Britain, including train and double decker bus. They sail a small sailboat across the English Channel, which tips us off to Charley having troubles with boats, a curse he remains under long term. Traveling by train, boat, small bus, the back of a truck, even elephant is very interesting going and while the cameras are mostly focused on the countries they visit, you see the state of the people living there, and the roads tell their own story. India, Nepal, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and finally Australia each have their own courage or hardships. Its a VERY long trip, covered in six one-hour episodes. I found it on YouTube but I'm hoping it will become available on Hulu.com soon so it can be part of the same series with Long Way Round etc.
The following year Charley and Co. go from Sydney to Tokyo, which is even more interesting because there's no agonizing over timetables and by now Charley is a serious traveler and largely unflappable, having witnessed all sorts of threats that are often just posturing for the camera. Australia is friendly and fun, New Guinea not so much. Parts of New Guinea were friendly and trying to be more tourist friendly, other parts need military presence and an ongoing war there meant that crossing into the Indonesian side was denied. This ends up a recurring problem. Indonesians themselves seemed reasonably friendly and civilized so long as you aren't crossing a border. It isn't until the show gets them to the Philippines that you see the truly friendly folks. I have worked extensively with Filipinos. They all speak English and their goals in life are similar to mine so they're friendly and easy to understand, culturally. Other than the Maoists, the rest of the Philippines is a place probably worth visiting, though its like a Mexico with even worse poverty but without the language barrier. Frequent typhoons probably don't help with their poverty problems, and a long series of Dictators (Marcos!) has been disastrous for stealing the funds from needed public works (sanitation, public transit, hospitals, schools). The remainder of the trip is through Taiwan and Japan, which I haven't seen yet but will soon. Both nations are good for motorcycling and have better roads than the more Southern countries.
In every country they hire a guide and translator and some of them offer very helpful warnings or illustrate important cultural differences. In New Guinea, there's a local culture that doesn't allow women to touch men's hair. In the highlands some farmers with machetes demand a road toll because they want money. They're bandits due to poverty. Another place sees drunken locals demanding the government pay them for a bridge that isn't there anymore to a government that long since vanished and has no representatives present anyway. People can get really stupid. In one part of New Guinea, a local tribe has decided they like the look of suburbs so are organizing their village that way, sort of like a cargo cult. They have no electricity, no doctor, no stores, no bridges, no serious sanitation. They want those things but all they can offer is hand built crafts. I wish them well. I'd want those things too, living as they do. One of the locations they visit in Indonesia has some amazing looking houses and bases its entire culture around funerals and the associated feasts. Their efforts go to raising the animals to sacrifice for the feast, pigs and cattle. Fascinating. In island nations ferries tend to be overcrowded, and when they sink hundreds die because there's only lifeboats for a hundred people. The roads are rarely paved, and when they are they're the main roads that tourists see or government officials use. Many of the people riding on motorcycles or underbone scooters tend to skip basic safety gear and end up in terrible accidents, known collectively as the "road tax", essentially meaning blood and death. Banditry in some countries is common, in others quite rare. If you plan to travel there, pay attention to the difference.
The most recent Charley Boorman trip is across Canada called Extreme Frontiers. I am looking forward to that, though ADVRider.com has a bunch of those pictorial trips, as Canada is the sort of place you won't likely run into kidnap gangs with AK-47's, RPGs, and ransoms in mind. I'm really not brave enough to do the kind of travel Charley has done in these video documentaries with the BBC.
There are other good travelogues worth seeing. No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain are entertaining food tourism which goes around the world eating various foods, seeing the touristy stuff. I enjoy the episodes he spends in Osaka, in South Korea, and in Malaysia. He's a cad, but he's pretty funny. That's available on Netflix Streaming and on Hulu and gets played on Travel channel and Food Network, of course.
Rick Steves was a good way to show off Europe back when there were only five network TV channels and one of those was PBS. I watched a lot of Rick Steves and while I don't agree with all of his methods, packing light is a good rule of thumb for traveling. These days Rick travels with his family and meanders around much of Europe, including the Eastern side. Someday, maybe, Turkey and Georgia will settle down into a nice tourist destination. We can keep our fingers crossed on that one. His show is also on Hulu.com.
While Central and South America are interesting, I'm not brave enough for Mexico's violence and I don't speak other languages (Spanish or Portuguese) so I can't just ask for help if they don't speak English. I'm glad that someone has gone to all these places so I can watch the travelogues from the comfort of my own home and be astonished at the things they see. America is big enough for me and holds plenty of vistas worth seeing in person. I would enjoy riding a dual sport bike through sections of the Rockies some day.
See why I like Bishop so much?
I would like to climb up through the White Mountains that way in a few years. They're plenty tall and offer lots of challenges. I don't care that others have been there before. That's not the point. Discovery is about YOU, not someone else. Go see it for yourself, if you can. If you can't, well, the above videos are a feast you can enjoy. Watch them.
